I’m going to start a blog here. I don’t know how this will go, or how often I’ll update it. It gives me somewhere to report on all the projects I work on. Some posts might have a short tid-bit on something cool I made, while others might have tip and tricks I learned while doing something.

Blogging

I might as well start off with starting this blog. I’m using Jekyll to make the website. Then I’m using Github Pages to host it. Both are awesome, open-source technologies. To get started, I had to install both Ruby and Jekyll. Then to create a new jekyll site I ran the command jekyll new prestonhager.github.io. This creates a very basic blog site in that directory. The next step was to configure the site how I wanted. All of these settings are in the _config.yml file. I only changed things such as the name, description, and email. There’s also an option for themes, but more on that later.

Now that we’ve configured the site, we can run it. To do that, we run the following command, bundle exec jekyll serve. This runs the website at 127.0.0.1:400. You can then see that the website should have a simple formatting through the theme and contain information you put in your _config.yml file. There’s one more thing to customize though. In the top right there’s an About link. This is from the about.markdown or about.md file. Open that up, and you’ll see the template page. The top is a table that looks something like this, Jekyll uses it to figure out what layout page to use and other information.

---
layout: page
title: About
permalink: /about/
---

The layout property gives Jekyll what layout page to use. This is an HTML page in the theme, we can also overwrite them, more on that later. The layout page being used here is _layouts/page.html in the theme’s folder. To find the folder being used by the theme run the command bundle info --path [theme]. Any filenames under the _layouts folder can by used as the layout name. The title is simply the title of the page. The two other properties are actually read by the layout and not jekyll, so you can pass any parameter in to the layout files.

Pages

Pages for the blog are stored under the _posts folder. Each post must start with a date in the format year-month-day and then the title of the post. The title doesn’t matter as much, but should follow the same format of dashes and lowercase.

Themes

Changing the theme is also an option. I ran into a few issues with this while experimenting though.